Militarization: War At Home By Catherine Lutz

The process of militarization is a complicated and not so straight forward system of routinized and normalized violence in addition to a substantial shift of social perceptions and relationships, followed by, at the very least, massive resource allocation to a military or para-military organization. Two ways that a citizen could be swept up into militarization is quietly and loudly. Quietly happens when the choice is made for the citizen, and loudly is when the active engagement of militarization is a personal choice. Both directions of being swept into militarization can have ideologies attached to them but, often militarization can happen without and open agreement of these ideologies.

Militarization of a civilized society can be very quiet,

Routinizing and normalizing terror has aided the U.S in effectively allocating resources to the military, changing social perceptions and ideologies and creating a large standing army under the guise of humanitarian efforts. As author Catherine Lutz attempts to provide an explanation for the process of militarization in her paper Making War at home in the United States, she is very correct in that this process is complicated and discursive (Lutz 2002). Quiet militarization has an ideology of terror attached to it, and is in part why it has been largely successful in the united states. When the atrocities of 9/11 happened, the public needed to blame someone, and so the government created an ideology that centred around people of Asiatic countries, specifically those of the Muslim faith, as terrorists, criminals and the enemy. However, it is not necessary for successful militarization that all the citizens believe this ideology, as they have been swept into the militarization process without realizing it. Another author who provides reference to this quiet form of

The rebel movement in Sierra Leone gathered steam due to the use of economic poverty and political unrest in the country as a recruiting tactic. Social perceptions shifted rather quickly and created a pathway for normalized violence and systemic terror. As Kieran Mitton outlines in his book, Rebels In A Rotten State Understanding the atrocity in Sierra Leone, the brutal and violent acts that were committed against civilians in Sierra Leone could not have occurred if the political ideology spewed by the rebel movement, abbreviated to the RUF, was not at least partially true. Without this discourse on a rotten government, demands for health care and education from the citizens, the RUF would not have gained the ability to militarize an entire country. The escalation of atrocities committed against the civilians not holding to the RUF ideologies created another terror normalization tactic that swept most of the country into militarization. Many people openly refused to be caught into the web of complicated militarization, but were met with world-shaping views that ultimately forced them to conform or to die (Mitton